verimcp

A trusted agent stack for MCP

Problem

MCP tool calls are trusted by default. When a server says a commit succeeded, a file was written, or a CI check passed, the Host has no way to know if that's true — isError: false only means the tool didn't crash, not that it did what it claimed. An agent wired up to git, CI, or infrastructure through MCP is one confidently-wrong tool response away from acting on a lie.

Solution

verimcp is a transparent proxy that sits between an MCP Host and a backend server. It forwards every message unchanged, except: for calls it knows how to check, it independently re-derives the real outcome (re-reads the file, re-checks the git log, re-runs the safe parts of a CI step) and compares that against what the backend claimed. A lie gets rewritten into a real error before the Host ever sees it as a success.

devmcp is the backend it's proven against — a real git/CI MCP server, deliberately built with the full protocol surface (tools, resources, prompts, roots, sampling), because a proxy is only as convincing as what it's shown catching.

Host  <--stdio-->  verimcp (proxy + verification)  <--stdio-->  devmcp (git/CI server)

Both are independently installable and have no import dependency on each other — verimcp works in front of any MCP backend (proven against the official mcp-server-git too, not just devmcp), and devmcp works with any Host directly, unproxied.

See it work

pip install verimcp devmcp-server
python scripts/demo.py

That spins up two real subprocess pipes and prints the raw JSON-RPC exchange: one where a backend fabricates a commit hash and verimcp catches it (isError: true, with the real reason), one where a backend writes a real file and verimcp's independent check confirms it and lets the response through unchanged. No mocks — real git repos, real subprocesses, real proxy.

The same claim, proven at larger scale: tests/test_adversarial_corpus.py runs 6 different fabrications (fake commit, fake branch, false CI pass, fake resource read, wrong-shape fake commit, a write that never touched disk) through the real proxy pipe. verimcp catches 6/6.

Technical summary

• Correctness verifiers — one per tool/resource with an independently-checkable postcondition: write_file (disk hash-compare), git_commit/git_branch (re-derived from real git state), run_ci_pipeline (self-consistency + re-execution of steps marked safe to re-run), plus resource reads (repo://status, repo://log, repo://file/{path}). New verifiers are a plugin system (importlib.metadata.entry_points, the same mechanism pytest/Black use) — see docs/writing-a-verifier.md.
• Policy gates — allow/deny/require-approval rules evaluated before a call reaches the backend, for the calls that have no objective truth to check (sampling rate limits, arbitrary tool-name/argument policy via YAML, human-in-the-loop approval over real MCP elicitation/create).
• Audit + replay — every call verimcp handles is logged and served back as a real verimcp://audit MCP resource; verimcp replay re-runs recorded traffic against a new policy to backtest "would this have changed anything."
• Observability — every call gets an OpenTelemetry span/metric using the GenAI semantic conventions, exportable to any OTLP collector.
• Proven against real clients, not just our own tests — the official MCP Inspector and VS Code's native MCP support (Copilot Chat) each caught a real bug our own test suite never triggered, now fixed with regression tests.

Deeper design reasoning (why prompts/roots get no verifier on principle, why policy is a separate concept from verification, etc.) lives in docs/adr/ for anyone who wants to go that deep — the summary above is everything needed to use or evaluate the project.

Getting started

As a user — install straight from PyPI:

pip install verimcp devmcp-server
verimcp -- devmcp --repo-path ./some-repo

Note on names: the PyPI distribution is devmcp-server (devmcp was blocked by PyPI's typosquat-similarity check against an unrelated existing package), but the Python import and CLI command are both still plain devmcp — nothing above changes if you're reading devmcp's own source.

As a contributor — editable installs from this repo:

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pip install -e "./devmcp[dev]"

pytest tests devmcp/tests   # 136 tests, real subprocess + real git repo, nothing mocked
ruff check src tests devmcp/src devmcp/tests

python scripts/inspector_smoke_test.py   # verify against the real MCP Inspector client (needs node/npx)

Try the observability yourself

# spans/metrics print to stderr (verimcp's stdout is the live MCP protocol channel)
verimcp --otel-exporter console -- devmcp --repo-path ./some-repo

# or point a real collector, Jaeger, or Grafana Agent at it
pip install "verimcp[otel]"
verimcp --otel-exporter otlp --otel-endpoint localhost:4317 -- devmcp --repo-path ./some-repo

Omitting --otel-exporter entirely means zero telemetry overhead — the default, same as every other opt-in flag here.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md — dev setup, how to add a verifier, this project's ADR discipline, and commit/PR conventions. See CHANGELOG.md for release history.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.